Michael Rosen marks Anne Frank anniversary with new poem
JVL Introduction
We draw your attention to this new poem by Michael Rosen, on the 75th anniversary of the publication of Anne Frank’s Diary.
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Sat 25 Jun 2022. Read the original here.
Michael Rosen marks Anne Frank anniversary with new poem
Seventy-five years after Diary of a Young Girl’s publication, Sonnet for Anne Frank reflects on the ‘awful paradox’ of the journal’s bright spirit and her fate
Former children’s laureate Michael Rosen has written a new poem to mark the 75th anniversary of the release of Anne Frank’s diary.
The poem is titled Sonnet for Anne Frank; Rosen wrote in this form, he said, because sonnets have “a certain kind of dignity” and give “you time to reflect”.
Rosen addresses Frank directly in the poem writing, “you compressed so much life into that loft”, but that “each time we read, we struggle to enjoy / your love of life while knowing how it ended”.
Rosen said: “I’ve got an unresolved dilemma in the poem, which is that in the diary you’re reading a person who is so alive and so full of hope and life’s details and problems from a teenager’s point of view, but it’s almost impossible to read it without thinking of her terrible fate. So there is an awful paradox between the living spirit of the diary and the knowledge that you have.
“[The poem] makes a space for the reader to dwell on that paradox, which is in its own way quite painful. You laugh a lot with Anne Frank, and you think she’s having fun at the neighbours’ expense, and then you just suddenly have this simultaneous sense of being appalled by the terrible end.
“And that’s why it ends on the word ‘ended’.”
Frank received a blank diary for her 13th birthday on 12 June 1942, and wrote in it while she and her family were in hiding in a secret annexe above her father Otto’s workplace in Amsterdam.
After the family were discovered by the Nazis, Otto’s secretary Miep Gies found the diary in the annexe. When the war was over Gies gave it to Otto, the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust, and he decided to publish it, as Anne had wished. When translated from Dutch to English, the book’s title became The Diary of a Young Girl.
The poem was commissioned by the Anne Frank Trust, an education charity that teaches young people to challenge prejudice.
Rosen, who is a longtime supporter of the trust, is currently professor of children’s literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. He served as children’s laureate from 2007 to 2009.
As well as much-loved children’s poems and the classic picture book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, his books include The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II, which was released in 2020 and traced family members who died in the Holocaust.
Sonnet for Anne Frank by Michael Rosen
Since you took us into that attic space
no room under the eaves has been the same.
Wherever we go – our homes or others’ –
whenever we dip and duck under beams
you are in the shadows, writing pages
laughing, crying, eating, daring to love
imagining a better world than yours.
How you wrote leads us to think we know you.
You compressed so much life into that loft
which we pore over and love you for it
yet the real world – not the one you imagined –
didn’t allow you to live and write any more.
Each time we read, we struggle to enjoy
your love of life while knowing how it ended.
❤️
A moving, truthful ode to all those who have been and are and will be robbed of the life they love by people to whom life means nothing.
Such a beautiful tribute to a brave young girl from a writer who has his own painful links to the Holocaust.
Wonderful sonnet. So sad and so true. Her stories will last forever even though her life was so short. Thank you Michael Rosen.
Thoughtful poem. Splendid closing couplet.
Lovely tribute to a young girl who will be forever young ,her life taken by an evil that unless we are more vigilant will rise again.
Thank you Michael Rosen.
Its when they attack the innocent that we know which side we’re on.
Very powerful piece.
Thank you Michael Rosen.
Those words took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes. So many thoughts flashed through my mind, none of them were good.
Thanks again for those lovely and moving words.
I have visited the Anne Frank house three times, and with each viewing have been reduced to tears – the experience, far from being dulled by repetition, only grows more intense. Anne belongs to a tradition that runs counter to the often resentful feelings of many of today’s Zionists – a tradition that is tolerant, hopeful, inclusive, loving, forgiving. Because of what she wrote, that spirit continues to inspire young people all over the world – not only Jews, but Jews certainly, including many who live in Israel. That has to be our hope, that in a world polluted by violence and hatred, the message she taught will ultimately prevail, helping to steer us towards a recognition of our shared humanity, to the abandonment of tribal hatred, to reconciliation, and ultimately to the kind of peace that allows us all to co-exist in a state of tolerance and absolute equality. Michael in his poem speaks of the dark réalisation that Anne’s love of life ended in torment, but while that is an aspect of her story it is not the only one. What moves me most whenever I visit the Anne Frank House is not the tragedy of her life but a sense of the animating presence of her spirit, within the attic walls, but also in the world outside.